NYT OPINION: American Teens Are Really Miserable. Why?
By Ross Douthat
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: February 18, 2023 at 02:00AM
Adults in every era tend to fret about the condition of the youth relative to the good old days when we ourselves were young and full of promise. But in the debate about these psychological trends, the alarmists have the better of the argument: As cataloged by N.Y.U.’s Jonathan Haidt, a leading alarm-sounder, in indicator after indicator you can see an inflection point somewhere in the early 2010s, where a darkening begins that continues to this day.
Haidt thinks the key instigator is the rise of social media. Other causal candidates, enumerated by Derek Thompson of The Atlantic in his helpful essays on the subject, tend to have a stronger ideological valence — a liberal might point to teenage anxiety about climate change or school shootings or the rise of Donald Trump, a conservative might insist that it’s the baleful effects of identity politics or the isolation created by Covid-era lockdowns.
Overall I think if you’re looking for a single explanatory shock, Haidt’s camp has the better of the argument. The timing of the mental health trend fits the smartphone’s increasing substitution for in-person socialization, while the Great Awokening and Trumpism are more chronologically downstream. And the coronavirus era exacerbated the problem without being a decisive shift.
By Ross Douthat
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: February 18, 2023 at 02:00AM
Social media has added to a sense of isolation.
American teenagers, and especially American teenage girls, are increasingly miserable: more likely to entertain suicidal thoughts and act on them, more likely to experience depression, more likely to feel beset by “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” to quote a survey report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Adults in every era tend to fret about the condition of the youth relative to the good old days when we ourselves were young and full of promise. But in the debate about these psychological trends, the alarmists have the better of the argument: As cataloged by N.Y.U.’s Jonathan Haidt, a leading alarm-sounder, in indicator after indicator you can see an inflection point somewhere in the early 2010s, where a darkening begins that continues to this day.
Haidt thinks the key instigator is the rise of social media. Other causal candidates, enumerated by Derek Thompson of The Atlantic in his helpful essays on the subject, tend to have a stronger ideological valence — a liberal might point to teenage anxiety about climate change or school shootings or the rise of Donald Trump, a conservative might insist that it’s the baleful effects of identity politics or the isolation created by Covid-era lockdowns.
Overall I think if you’re looking for a single explanatory shock, Haidt’s camp has the better of the argument. The timing of the mental health trend fits the smartphone’s increasing substitution for in-person socialization, while the Great Awokening and Trumpism are more chronologically downstream. And the coronavirus era exacerbated the problem without being a decisive shift.
Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/18/opinion/depression-teen-social.html
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